Dance Your Troubles Away

Cities are like people.  Each one has its own personality: a mixture of industry, cultural heritage, and passion.  Many great cities are motivated by one unifying factor that can be found in almost every part of the city’s identity.  New Orleans for its spicy creole-influenced jazz; graceful Paris with its fashion and ballet, Barcelona for its art and architecture, just to name a few.

 

Dance is the life-blood of Buenos Aires, more specifically tango. From the Parisian elegance of Recoleta to the colorful streets of La Boca, tango permeates the city.  Like the fading memory of a doomed love affair, ivy vines of melody wind their way through the streets.  At once wistful and stirring, sensual and melancholy the haunting notes waft from the subways, drift out of the milongas, * and fill the markets, enchanting passersby drawing them into another world. 

When I first arrived in Buenos Aires, though curious, I could not understand the fascination.  Every traveler who came to Buenos Aires seemed to eat sleep and breathe tango.  Though many “porteños” take it for granted, or claim it to be old-fashioned or touristic, this tango culture has its mark on even the most skeptical of the Buenos Aires locals.  Through playing, teaching, dancing, or just listening; almost everyone I met seemed somehow involved in the tango culture.

 

With all the talk of dance, a faint recollection stirred in the dimly lit recesses of my mind.  Just before I had left New York I had been talking to K, a woman whom I had recently met and had been telling her about Roseland and the seniors dance night.  It came out that she was taking dance classes from a man who was also a dance movement therapist. 

 

I had heard of movement therapy and things like the Feldenkrais Method, but dance as therapy?  Unfortunately I was running late and didn’t have a chance to talk about it for long, but I made a mental note to research it.  A note that I did not write down….

 

Now, months later the half-remembered conversation prompted me to google it.  At once a long list of links to sites, articles, book, and organizations appeared on my screen.  The further I read the more fascinating my discovery became....

 

Dance/Movement Therapy (DMT) has in fact been a profession since the 1940s.  It is defined by the American Dance Therapy Association (ADTA) as, “the psychotherapeutic use of movement as a process which furthers the emotional, social, cognitive, and physical integration of the individual.”  The ADTA also reports that there are practicing dance movement therapists in 43 states, 21 countries and 5 continents.  I was appalled that I not heard of such a prolific form of therapy.  How could this have happened, I wondered?

 

The answer hit me like a ton of bricks.  I had not heard of it because I wasn’t open to it.  Directly after the accident, and for many years, I was more than happy to work at compensating for my deficits, but trying to fix them directly would have been too scary.  It would have been admitting what was wrong and coming face to face with what you have lost is a terrifying prospect.  Dance therapy came a little too close to that. 

 

Not only had the accident had impaired my gross motor skills, but it had devastated my visual/spatial skills, and awareness of how my body was positioned.  In other words, I would not be able to see a step and repeat it – my mind/body connection was so poor someone would need to physically show me how the step would feel for it to begin to register.  I couldn’t follow a class, let alone memorize choreography – dancing seemed like an insurmountable challenge.

 

Gross motor skill and body awareness impairments are quite common for brain injury survivors; because of this and my personal experience I had not given a moment’s thought that dance could be used as therapy.  But the more I thought about it, dance therapy made perfect sense. 

 

Dance movement therapy (DMT) is based on the principle that the mind and body are interconnected – by changing one and you will affect the other.  By changing the way you move you change the way you think, feel, and behave – movement affects and reflects personality.  This holistic philosophy explains w

hy brain injury can deeply affect body awareness and the way a survivor moves.  

 

More scientifically, learning to move in new ways causes a person to use different parts of the brain.  Working these areas creates new pathways which builds and strengthening the brain as a whole.  This in turn helps to compensate for damage and furthers improvement in all areas. Paying attention to the way you move, breathe, and reconnecting the mind and body is paramount to improvement.

 

 

Though it has been over a decade since the accident I am taking my own advice and stepping up to the challenge.  With an audible gulp I am swallowing my pride and starting to learn tango – in group classes.

 

  Photos by Lucy Usher

 

*places to dance tango

 

 

 

http://www.adta.org/

 

http://www.nccata.org/dance_therapy.htm

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dance_therapy